ad ever looked upon as
goodness incarnate.

"Had I not known that some day I must speak to you as I am speaking now,
I had long since abandoned a task which I did not consider good. But I
feared to leave you. I feared that if I were removed my place might be
taken by some time-server who to earn a livelihood would tutor you as
your mother would have you tutored, and thrust you forth without warning
upon the life to which you have been vowed.

"Once, years ago, I was on the point of resisting your mother." He
passed a hand wearily across his brow. "It was on the night that Gino
Falcone left us, driven forth by her because she accounted it her duty.
Do you remember, Agostino?"

"O, I remember!" I answered.

"That night," he pursued, "I was angered--righteously angered to see
so wicked and unchristian an act performed in blasphemous
self-righteousness. I was on the point of denouncing the deed as it
deserved, of denouncing your mother for it to her face. And then I
remembered you. I remembered the love I had borne your father, and my
duty to him, to see that no such wrong was done you in the end as that
which I feared. I reflected that if I spoke the words that were burning
my tongue for utterance, I should go as Gino Falcone had gone.

"Not that the going mattered. I could better save my soul elsewhere than
here in this atmosphere of Christianity misunderstood; and there
are always convents of my order to afford me shelter. But your being
abandoned mattered; and I felt that if I went, abandoned you would be to
the influences that drove and moulded you without consideration for
your nature and your inborn inclinations. Therefore I remained, and left
Falcone's cause unchampioned. Later I was to learn that he had found a
friend, and that he was... that he was being cared for."

"By whom?" quoth I, more interested perhaps in this than in anything
that he had yet said.

"By one who was your father's friend," he said, after a moment's
hesitation, "a soldier of fortune by name of Galeotto--a leader of free
lances who goes by the name of Il Gran Galeotto. But let that be. I want
to tell you of myself, that you may judge with what authority I speak.

"I was destined," Agostino, for a soldier's life in the following of my
valiant foster-brother, your father. Had I preserved the strength of
my early youth, undoubtedly a soldier's harness would be strapped here
to-day in the place of this scapulary. But it happened that an i